Free Law Project is excited to announce that over the next several
months we will be collaborating with the University of Baltimore and
Assistant Professor of Law, Colin Starger, to build a web-based version
of his Supreme Court Mapping
Project, a
software-driven effort to visualize Supreme Court doctrine. Currently a
desktop software tool, the collaboration will move this functionality to
the web, incorporating it directly into Free Law Project’s
CourtListener platform.

Once incorporated into CourtListener, users will be able to create
visualizations of how different cases cite each other, including
plotting them against variables from the Supreme Court
Database such as whether the case had
a liberal or conservative outcome, and the minority/majority votes of
the justices. Using the CourtListener citation API, Colin and his
partner Darren Kumasawa have done a lot of work in this area already,
laying a great foundation for this project.

The current design

We hope that within a few months our new service will go live, and that
teachers, librarians, and researchers will be able to create great new
visualizations of Supreme Court doctrine. If you’ve been watching Colin
and Darren’s work over on the Supreme Court Mapping Project’s
blog, and are interested in getting
involved as an early tester of this new platform, be sure to get in
touch. As an explicitly social
project,
we need early testers to help us prove that our assumptions are good and
to bring more great ideas to the table.